


Something Wicked This Way Comes

by Losille



Category: Actor RPF, British Actor RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, F/M, Gen, Ghosts, Goddesses, Gods, Halloween, Hellhounds, Humor, Macbeth - Freeform, Undead, Witches
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-01
Updated: 2013-10-01
Packaged: 2017-12-28 03:18:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/987034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Losille/pseuds/Losille
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tom meets Cate at his limited-run Halloween production of the Scottish Play and ends up in the middle of a twisted curse.  Witches, ghosts, the undead and a hellhound or two only complicate matters.  Humor.  Magic.  Shakespeare.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Something Wicked This Way Comes

**Author's Note:**

> This will be short and sweet as far as my other stories go as I attempt to get it all finished before Halloween. Instead of NaNoWriMo, it is now NaOcWriMo for me. Doesn’t have the same ring to it, but you get the point. *cracks knuckles in preparation* Enjoy!

It never fails.

One minute I’m walking around my home, enjoying my time with my dogs and my polecats, guzzling a rather large goblet of Dionysus’ best vintage and BAM! I’m suddenly lying face down in a ditch in some stinking, dirty, vile English town. 

“Lady!”

“Are you all right?”

“Where did she come from?”

“Is she alive?”

I felt a warm hand on my arm and heard the anxious murmur of whispers as they surrounded me. 

“Someone call an ambulance.”

I groaned in pain and dug my fingernails into the stone beneath me, pressing my palms flat to ease myself onto my knees. Even though my body ached, I knew it wasn’t from the impact I’d made with the earth, but rather from the reshaping and reconstituting I’d gone through to put me back into my tiny human package. The shock of the transformation always made me ache in the worst mortal way.

“Maybe you shouldn’t get up,” said a gruff voice beside me. I looked at the man askance. He was round and bald-headed, but he had a pleasant face with red cheeks and nose. The stench of ale on his breath, however, made me gag.

A rueful chuckle flew from my lips and I shook my head. “I’m fine,” I croaked, “I just tripped a bit and had the wind knocked out of me. Give me a moment.”

The man backed away while I glanced around at all the people watching the show. _Yes, people, goddesses do occasionally fall from the sky,_ I thought. With a huff, I stood on shaking human legs and brushed off the dirt and plant debris stuck to my dress until it was good enough that I could walk away in my indignity. Then I would find a quiet place to finish the job with a simple cleansing spell.

“Thank you,” I remarked to the man who stood there staring at me. Only then did I realize he was staring at my chest. Gods, I hated humans. Especially the males. They caused so many problems for everyone—mortal and immortal—with their egos and their promiscuity. “And no thank you.”

I left the gawkers to gape some more and walked quickly away, weaving a path down a busy street toward the crosswalk. A car barreled around a corner toward me and I barely missed it by hopping up onto the pathway. The driver opened his window and shouted a string of curses at me even though he had been the reckless one.

“You daft bint! Stay off the fucking road!” 

His grousing made me weary. Apparently the mortals still hadn’t realized that they didn’t govern the roads in which they traveled. I whispered a few ancient curses of my own, but didn’t engage the man further. He sped away from the scene; in the distance I heard screeching tires and metal warping and crushing. Satisfied that he was now paying for his earlier slight, I continued on my journey to the lodging I usually called home on my all too frequent visits to this damnable place.

After wandering the streets in confusion and delirium symptomatic of the goddess-to-human conversion process, I stepped into the marble encrusted building. The time piece on my wrist wasn’t working, so I had no idea how long I’d been walking, but I heaved a great sigh of relief at glimpsing the interior of the fine establishment. It reminded me a little of home with the clean white stone covering almost everything and gold leaf the rest of it; perhaps a little more like Olympus than my own dwelling between the heavens and earth, but it was more what I was accustomed to than what I was not. It would do just as it had done in the past.

A helpful woman dressed in drab attire smiled at me as I turned toward the front desk.

“May I help you, ma’am?” 

“Yes,” I replied. “You wouldn’t have any lodgings available, would you?”

The girl smiled, her long blonde ponytail bouncing behind her. “We do have vacancies. How will you be paying?”

“I won’t,” I replied and snapped my fingers.

“Oh, yes, of course, ma’am,” she said automatically. “How many nights will you be joining us?”

Heck if I knew.

“Tell me...” I said, leaning over the counter, “Do you have any productions of _Macbeth_ playing around here?”

The woman’s face brightened. “Yes! Are you here to see Tom Hiddleston?”

“What is a... Tom Hiddleston?” I asked her.

“He’s completely ruined my life, he has. A complete life ruiner,” the girl chirped and laughed at her own comment.

I frowned at her terribly confusing explanation. She was very odd. We were speaking the same language, but none of it ever made very much sense to me. Even though I gained a human body, I did not gain their current vocabulary. It always caused problems; I learned more with each visit only to find it outdated on my next. “What is a ‘life ruiner’?”

“It’s nothing.” She blushed and typed into her glowing beacon of information. They called it a computer the last time I was in town, I hoped that hadn’t changed either. The infernal thing spit out a small plastic square at the strange girl. “They’re putting on _Macbeth_ at the Globe right now.”

I sighed. I loathed that place—the original and the new one. At least my most recent visits to the human world had included closed theatres with soft seats. I preferred comfort. “The Globe?” 

“Yes,” she said. “But they’re all sold out, I’m sorry to say. My friend and I tried to get tickets, but they were gone in ten seconds.”

I nodded my head and kept my mouth shut. With magic on my side, I needn’t worry about tickets or whatever this life ruiner Tom Hiddleston was. “I’ll be here for the duration of the production.”

“For the month?” she asked.

“Gods, I sincerely hope not,” I replied. “What month is it, by the way?”

“October,” she answered me in some sort of a trance as she communed with her shiny oracle before eventually passing over the plastic square with a smile. “We have you booked for the month in our premier suite, Ms. Hekatos. Will there be anything else?”

“No.” I left her without asking for directions, knowing my way about this building better than most. When I reached my room, I stepped inside and drew in a deep breath.

They had redecorated since last I’d been here, but the bed felt like the softest of clouds as I fell back onto it and looked up at the bland white ceiling. Back home, I’d be looking up at a dark, starry sky, not a blinking red eye on a plastic disc affixed to it. But that was easily remedied. 

I raised my right hand and brushed it across the right corner of the ceiling from my vantage point, moving it back and forth length wise, erasing the white paint as I chanted in my native tongue. Velvet black shod through with diamond glitter appeared above me; these were my stars and I could not rest without them or their friend the moon.

Whispering, I drew a small crescent with my finger and tapped at the center of the shape to engage the ethereal glow. I hummed in pleasure. It was the least I could do to make the length of my stay somewhat tolerable.

I yawned and decided to crawl beneath the soft, voluminous bedclothes. A goddess needed her beauty sleep, after all, and I would have a very busy day in the morning.

\----

As I stood on the edge of the thrust stage and surveyed the empty seats and groundling space that would be filled in a few hours, I let out a long, contented exhale. It was good to be back in London doing Shakespeare; I’d spent much too long on press junkets and movie sets of late. I was in need of a serious recharging and the only remedy for that was staying at home for a bit and by burying myself in the literature that had for so long been my greatest comfort.

Even if it _was_ the title role in the Scottish Play and I had long steered clear of accepting any offers to play him.

I’m not by nature a superstitious person, but every trained theatre actor is made intimately aware of the Scottish Play’s horror stories from the very outset of their career—some as early as high school. They’re like ghost stories told around a campfire. Those ones where the torch gets passed around a circle, highlighting the face of the speaker as they attempt to relate the scariest legends of their knowledge, each story outdoing the next until it becomes ridiculous. None of them were true, but there was always that one iota of plausibility that made them seem real. As for the Scottish Play, there was more real evidence than was strictly necessary to make it believable. 

Erring on the side of caution and taking the precaution not to say the name became paramount to any production. No one _wanted_ to tempt fate, but I had certainly had fun openly razzing the crew member who had accidentally said the name in the middle of dress rehearsal the previous night. The whole crew had. A group of us had picked him up and carried him out of the theatre, dropped a bucket of icy water on his head and made him spin around as he said the name three times to ward off the bad luck.

Then we all looked at each other, had a good laugh, and returned to rehearsal. When we’d done a successful, full run through, we all breathed a sigh of relief. Because the curse wasn’t real. And we certainly didn’t believe in it.

At all.

I chuckled at the memory and shook my head. Superstition and nothing more. The sun had dawned bright on this golden autumn day and I couldn’t foresee anything happening to muck it all up now. I knew my lines, my marks, and the choreography like the back of my hand. My costars and crew did as well. We would put on a wonderful show and an urban legend would remain an urban legend.

Just as I turned around to head backstage to begin preparing for curtain, a long, high howl of some sort of canine caught on the wind and made me pause in my spot. I thought it strange that dogs would be howling at this time of night or that there would be one close enough that I could hear him. 

With a shake of my head and a smile, I spun on my heels to leave. That was when I saw her out of the corner of my eye.

She moved across the groundling pit as though she floated on thin air. Thick, inky black waves of hair cascaded down her back and blew in the breeze like some sort of fragrance advertisement. She wore a simple knee-length dress with brown riding boots; even though it wasn’t necessarily revealing, there was a diaphanous quality to the white linen dress that made her unblemished alabaster skin seem even more effervescent. She nearly glowed. My mouth watered and I swallowed around a lump in my throat when she stopped and looked directly at me.

Her eyes twinkled like stars in the night sky. But then they weren’t stars. They were two obsidian orbs—with just enough brown so as not to make them dark as pitch—that caught the glimmer of the orange sun setting behind the building. I’d never seen a pair of eyes that color before, nor had I ever been struck so completely dumb from one simple look. A smile curved her perfectly bowed, rosy lips and she blinked long, feathery lashes against her cheek. 

Before I knew it, she had ascended the stairs to the stage and stood in front of me expectantly.

“Hello,” she said when I could not immediately form words.

“Uh, hi,” I replied. “May I help you?”

“We shall see,” she said. “Do you know who the life ruiner is? The life ruiner Tom Hiddleston?”

My heart sank. Of course she would be a barmy fangirl, but in my defense, she was literally the most beautiful barmy fangirl I had clapped eyes on. Why had she acted as though she didn’t know who I was?

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “I’m Tom Hiddleston.”

“Perfect!” 

I swear to God her eyes ignited with fire at my pronouncement. Just to be sure I wasn’t seeing things, I closed my eyes and then opened them. No fire. I frowned. Was _I_ going crazy?

“Didn’t you see the posters outside with my portrait?” I asked her.

She waved her hand. “I have little time for noticing such trivial things, Tom Hiddleston.”

“Oh.” It sounded dumb coming from my lips. “Well, then, is there something I can do?”

 _Like call the police?_

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Cate,” she replied. “With a C.”

“Well, Cate with a C, how did you get into the building? You don’t work on the production or for the theatre,” I said. “You should probably leave.”

It wasn’t my nicest moment, but I had things _I_ had to do. And caring for a mad woman was not one of them.

“Are you playing Macbeth?” she asked.

I gasped at her flagrant disregard for the usage of the name and took a step back from her. “I am.”

“Even better.” Her grin wasn’t one that I would deem pleasant. She was practically rubbing her hands together as though a fortuitous twist in her plans had occurred.

I, on the other hand, saw my life flash before my eyes. What if she clobbered me over the head and dragged me away and no one ever heard from me again?

“You know you’re not supposed to say the name, right? Not on the stage?” I asked to stop my other thoughts dead in their tracks.

She flippantly shrugged and tossed a length of her hair behind a shoulder. “That’s just a legend, isn’t it?”

“You still don’t tempt fate,” I said.

Cate let out a harsh bark of laughter. I recoiled at the sound. One expected something beautiful to come from that perfect mouth of hers, not that discordant, terrible guffaw. I guess she had to have _some_ flaw, though—she couldn’t be perfect.

“The Fates, while fickle bitches, could care less about this infernal play or why I’m here,” she said.

“Hold on, now.” I completely ignored the fact that she spoke of the Fates as though she knew them personally. “It’s not that terrible.”

One perfectly arched brow rose up in question. “You really think so?”

I rolled my eyes and stepped back from the woman. Why was I even engaging her and playing into her delusion? “I don’t need to... You need to leave.”

“I’m not leaving,” she said. 

“You are,” I replied. “We have to prepare for the night and you’re not even allowed in here. If you’ll just come with me...” 

She pursed her perfect lips and crossed her arms over her chest. One of her booted feet tapped peevishly on the wooden stage. “I’m not done with you.”

I sighed. Where was everyone else? Why weren’t they coming out here? Why weren’t they rescuing me? When I realized she truly wouldn’t budge, I set a hand on her arm in the hope that my touch could coax her to move.

But that was the last thing I did before everything went black.


End file.
